Progress 8 is a new way of measuring school performance. It takes the Year 6 SATs maths and reading results of each student, and measures their GCSE performance against the GCSE results of other students with the same SATs scores.

For schools where students join in Year 7 and leave at the end of Year 11, this is a clear and logical method for measuring how effective the school has been over the full five years of students’ secondary education. In UTCs, however, students join in Year 10, and the college has therefore only been able to have an impact in only two out of the five years. Despite this, UTC Progress 8 scores still show an average of student progress from Year 7.

Because of this, the Department for Education acknowledges that Progress 8 is not a suitable measure for UTCs, stating on the 2017 performance tables website that “Progress 8 data for these schools is not directly comparable with the Progress 8 data for other schools.” [i]

Given this limitation, a methodology has been developed which involves performing a simple adjustment to allow for the proportion of a student’s secondary education spent at the UTC. Six terms (two academic years) is 40% of fifteen terms (five academic years) and the UTC’s Progress 8 score is therefore multiplied by 40% to provide a like with like comparison. For UTC@MediaCityUK this would produce a Progress 8 score of -0.49

For a more in-depth analysis of the limitations of Progress 8, please click here